Getting to work on diversity at Google

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2014/05/getting-to-work-on-diversity-at-google.html

by ismavis • 12 years ago

127 186 12 years ago

googleblog.blogspot.com

steele• 12 years ago

age diversity would be interesting as well

reddog• 12 years ago

Indeed. I would bet my last dollar that its workforce is skewed hugely, disproportionately young. And there are no convenient they-just-aren't-majoring-in-CS excuses for this either. Lots of 50 year old engineers with years of training and experience are looking for work.

kps• 12 years ago

I work for Google (though not in Silly Valley) and see no obvious sign of age discrimination here. I was 46 when hired.

skj• 12 years ago

(approximate) ages on my team at Google: 26, 32 (me), 35, ~55, ~60, ~70.

groby_b7• 12 years ago

Approximate ages on my team: A bunch of 20 year olds, a slightly lesser bunch of 30 year olds, and an even smaller bunch of 40 year olds. So far, I think none of us have reached 50. That's due to lack of candidates, same as with women. (And yes, there's outreach for that area too)

If you know experienced engineers looking for a job, please send them our way.

laluser• 12 years ago

Why is this surprising? CS is a relatively young major compared to other engineering degrees. Also, I would bet that a large majority of CS degrees have been handed out in the last 20 years. Probably more skewed towards the last 10.

nl9• 12 years ago

I don't have the statistics, but my impression from the Googlers I interact with is that they are generally older than the average developer.

xienze6• 12 years ago

Age diversity? Come on man, that's not important. What's really important is making sure Google isn't publicly lambasted for having too many white men on their staff.

omonra5• 12 years ago

Curious to see granularity by job type - ie engineers vs sales.

dandroid17• 12 years ago

I'm going to guess that a huge majority of that 30% female workforce is in HR, marketing, and other non-engineering roles.

ng12• 12 years ago

That's one of the interesting things. Statistically HR has a similar gender ratio as engineering, only reversed -- 72% of all HR professionals are women (http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.pdf).

ceras• 12 years ago

The official site breaks it down by tech/non-tech/leadership: http://www.google.com/diversity/at-google.html

samstokes• 12 years ago

Interesting that non-tech is less male-dominated than tech, as expected, but even more white-dominated.

Dwolb3• 12 years ago

It's great to be open and all, but they never mention what their goal is. Do Google believe diversity is good for workplace cohesion, their own social mobility goals, good corporate moral policy, etc.?

The data is interesting in it's own right but I don't better understand where Google is going with diversity; I only understand where Google currently stands.

DiggityDug7• 12 years ago

Does there have to be a business goal? Making society more fair is a good goal. Reducing the white male preference in the job market should be a social responsibility for a company that greatly impacts our daily lives.

There could be business goals though: it improves people's public opinion of you and in this case may help protect them from lawsuits.

This link at the bottom of the page has some more info... http://www.google.com/diversity/

EGreg3• 12 years ago

DiggityDug7, if only 5% of the country was black, say, would having under 10% of your workforce be black be considered unfair?

Likewise, if the number of comp sci graduates in the country is 5%, the same question can be asked. Who is the one being unfair?

ianstallings2• 12 years ago

Yes it takes the idea of a corporation strictly being beholden to shareholders and extends it to all stakeholders, which includes impacted society.

brighteyes• 12 years ago

Making society more fair is a good goal. Reducing the white male preference in the job market should be a social responsibility for a company that greatly impacts our daily lives.

The data Google just posted contradicts you. 61% of Google employees are white, while 80% of the total US workforce is, see e.g. http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/05/28/google-releases-emp...

That means white people are under-represented at Google.

The group whose representation is most diverging from the population as a whole are Asians, who are hugely over-represented.

Overall, the numbers show that Asians are over-represented, which may explain much of the under-representation by all other groups. So the story here is certainly not one of "white male preference in the job market". You might be right about male, but not about white.

Omniusaspirer3• 12 years ago

How is it unfair to hire what you perceive as the best candidate to work at your company? Something that's actually unfair would be disqualifying a better candidate purely because of his skin color/gender.

Also, just to emphasis what others have already replied to you; Whites are actually underrepresented at Google relative to the ratios seen in the rest of the workforce.

philipwalton• 12 years ago

As a Google employee, the reasons I hear is that we'd like the diversity of our workforce to more accurately reflect the diversity of our users, so we can serve them better.

Dwolb3• 12 years ago

I think this is a very interesting response. If it's true, then their diversity goal will be reached when the makeup of Google workforce is representative of the world population (assuming world population correlates well with Google user population). Therefore, focusing on bringing more women in to tech is a very good goal since women may make up 50% of Google users. Secondary and third goals would be to hire more representatives from Asia and Africa

justicezyx• 12 years ago

So that's way Google exited China, right? ...

enneff4• 12 years ago

As a Google employee, the reason I'd like to improve the diversity of my work place is so I can work with more than just a bunch of white dudes. I mean, white dudes are great and all, but I really value diversity of opinion and experience in my life.

kirkbackus2• 12 years ago

That's more of an ideal, not really an achievable goal. How does Google measure the diversity of its users? How does Google measure the quality of their service to each people group? Does this mean Google's ideal workforce would be a near 1:1 mapping of employees to the general user population?

bh3244• 12 years ago

why is diversity good? forced diversity seems very contrived. why should the percentage of women hired be higher than the number that graduate from school with a CS degree?

namenotrequired• 12 years ago

why should the percentage of women hired be higher than the number that graduate from school with a CS degree?

No one is implying that it should. From the blog they seem to be working on improving the latter number too.

frozenport• 12 years ago

>why is diversity good?

I want there to be more women whom I can date.

EduardoBautista• 12 years ago

I don't understand why companies are obsessed with diversity just for the sake of it.

Edit: I am mexican, and I personally wouldn't like to be hired for diversity reasons, I would prefer to be hired on my abilities.

Maascamp3• 12 years ago

Of course companies should only hire qualified people. Diversity is about gaining new perspectives and ensuring you're creating an environment _all_ your employees can enjoy and feel comfortable in.

Companies, rightly, don't want to stagnate by being limited to perspectives and views that don't fully reflect the world they operate in.

xienze6• 12 years ago

I hear this all the time but really, how much of an impact does "diversity" have on yet another shitty chat app or photo sharing site? They're creating utterly trivial, harmless social applications that have NOTHING to do with racial, cultural, or religious matters.

EGreg3• 12 years ago

I agree. I am a Russian Jew and I never needed or wanted to be hired based on diversity needs.

enneff4• 12 years ago

And Google wouldn't hire you just because you're a minority.

The article specifically discusses Google's attempts to lure people of diverse backgrounds into computer science earlier, so that there is more diversity among the qualified candidates applying at Google.

Nobody at Google got hired to fill a diversity quota.

ianstallings2• 12 years ago

Well there's using it as a checkbox and then there's real diversity. No one likes being patronized. But if it's done right you would still be judged on your abilities. And therein lies the challenge. It's a worthy goal but they better stay on top of it.

dragonwriter10• 12 years ago

I am mexican, and I personally wouldn't like to be hired for diversity reasons, I would prefer to be hired on my abilities.

Which is all a non-sequitur, since nothing in Google's blog post or the linked diversity website suggest that Google's approaches to improving diversity include hiring people for diversity reasons rather than for their abilities.

roots800• 12 years ago

Well, no one would ever admit that anyways.

Torgo3• 12 years ago

So women make up 18% of new CS degrees and Google's staffed at 17%. Blacks and hispanics make up under 5% of CS degrees and at Google they make up 3%. Close the ticket, it's an upstream problem.

rcthompson3• 12 years ago

Well, they say they're working with "upstream" to resolve the issue:

"Among other things, since 2010 we’ve given more than $40 million to organizations working to bring computer science education to women and girls. And we’ve been working with historically black colleges and universities to elevate coursework and attendance in computer science. For example, this year Google engineer Charles Pratt was in-residence at Howard University, where he revamped the school’s Intro to CS curriculum."

Torgo3• 12 years ago

My response was flippant, which is probably why some people have been downvoting it, but I'm legitimately glad if they're working to make their hiring pool more representative of the population. But at the same time, it's hardly their fault or responsibility to "fix" it if universities just aren't graduating people in those proportions. This came right after I'd read a PBS article that claimed "Google finally discloses its diversity record, and it’s not good." Then I read a breakdown of CS grads in this submission, and Google seems to be pretty representative.

Fishkins• 12 years ago

To be fair, the (real or perceived) opportunities for women and minorities at major tech companies like Google could very well influence the majors college students choose to pursue. If I were an 18 y.o. woman who read news articles or talked to family/friends in the industry who told me women are treated poorly at Google and the like, I might opt for a different degree. I have no idea how much of a factor this actually is in the proportions of college graduates, but I think it's worth considering as a possibility.

heterogenic2• 12 years ago

Not necessarily.

You're assuming that the factors which drive women out of engineering do so independent of ability.

I would hypothesize that this is false, that the most interested and passionate women are least likely to be nudged out. Google should be comparing its ratio to that of their potential pool, which is presumably skewed high. If that's true, they should be expecting to get closer to 50%. (Not exactly 50, but better than the holistic ratio at least.).

Also, they can look at their specific source pools to get a less hypothetical target. Berkeley is ~50/50, for example. (http://www.wired.com/2014/02/berkeley-women/). But retroactively

waveman23• 12 years ago

I would hypothesize that this is false

Citation required.

And if women are less interested overall in CS and/or have less ability on non-verbal tasks overall then you would expect that the RHS tail of the distribution of women would be lower than the RHS tail of the distribution of men. This is just basic statistics.

The same applies with African Americans. Blacks in the US have far lower IQs than whites - this is not in dispute though there is a certain amount of dispute about the reason, with some people attributing it to environment. As such the normal distribution will ensure that a much lower percentage of blacks will be at the high end of the scale (135IQ+) where google gets their recruits.

So the fact that google is close to the averages suggests they are already making a lot of effort to bring in women (and non-asian) minorities. Asians are highly over-represented at google versus their fraction of the population.

rhizome• 12 years ago

Does GOOG have any self-taughts in tech positions? Might be missing some data in the staffing-to-CS-grads proportions.

SwellJoe• 12 years ago

Not many, and they would mostly be acqui-hires or early hires. Google strongly prefers candidates from a list of preferred universities. If you didn't graduate from one, you'd need to be coming from another employer in order to get hired there (and even then, my understanding is that those with degrees from those universities have a better chance of being hired, all other things being equal).

They also hire (or at least recruit) based on Open Source work (I've gotten recruitment letters from them based on a book I wrote and some Open Source software I've been involved in), but I doubt that I would have been hired just on the strength of that. I've never taken them up on the offer of an interview, as I liked working for myself too much, but I suspect I would not measure up during the process, given my self-taught background and unimpressive education history. I know several folks who have been hired by Google, including folks who got the recruitment letter based on Open Source software work, and they tend to also have the strong college background.

In short, I believe that for those folks who end up at Google, they very likely got there by way of a good university. So, the upstream needs to be fixed for the diversity at Google to be fixed.

heydenberk• 12 years ago

It's {{current_year}} and people are still asking, "why does diversity matter?"

Diversity matters for a lot of reasons. Perhaps most importantly, demographic diversity is strongly correlated with diversity in points of view. You want the people building your products to come from many walks of life. Remember how Google+ had significant uptake in the rich white tech dude demographic? Not a coincidence. If you want the best people working at your company, you should want a group with similar demographics as the customer population, and if you disagree with that, you either believe there is something inherent about certain groups that makes them better or worse at these jobs, which is plainly bigoted, or you believe that there are external social biases which cause the discrepancies. If the latter is your belief, that's all the more reason to work to increase diversity as a corrective to those external social biases. Diversity also impacts the way that people see your company, which makes attracting a diverse pool of qualified candidates easier (few people want to be the only member of a certain demographic group) and is good for public relations.

Maascamp3• 12 years ago

Thank you for typing that all out. I agree completely. As a visible minority in tech, I'm simply more attracted to companies where I feel l won't stick out like a sore thumb. Of course I want to hired for my qualifications, but I'm only applying to companies that can meet _my_ requirements as well.

middleclick• 12 years ago

I don't get this logic. How does it matter if you are a sore thumb if you are not being discriminated? As someone who is also from a visible minority group, it never bothers me unless of course people change their behavior towards me because of the colour of my skin, which I have luckily never experienced.

Please don't feel that I am being condescending; I have come across this statement many times before and I can't understand it.

Torgo3• 12 years ago

"Remember how Google+ had significant uptake in the rich white tech dude demographic? Not a coincidence."

The founders of Twitter and Facebook are mostly rich white dudes and don't seem to be having this problem.

nostrademons• 12 years ago

Twitter and Facebook also had significant uptake first in the rich white tech dude demographic (or in Facebook's case, the rich white college student demographic). It's just that they later grew to encompass...everyone.

For that matter, look at the social networks that have flourished abroad: Orkut (developed by a Turkish engineer) and WhatsApp (developed by a Ukrainian). So there may be something to this...

hindsightbias• 12 years ago

Perhaps it would be worth looking at who Naomi Gleit's peers would be at Google+ and Twitter.

omonra5• 12 years ago

Successful tech companies have to be staffed by very smart nerds. So at the end of the day their pool of candidates is that group. So the numbers you see are reflective of the people who make up that pool.

If you want to see more X in it - work on attracting X into the pool of smart nerds.

wetmore• 12 years ago

That's what half this blog post was about.

yaketysax• 12 years ago

"If you want the best people working at your company, you should want a group with similar demographics as the customer population"

It's not the role of every single worker to deal with how the customer interfaces with the product. So what's the point in having diversity at every level?

"and if you disagree with that, you either believe there is something inherent about certain groups that makes them better or worse at these jobs,"

no.

"or you believe that there are external social biases which cause the discrepancies."

nope

groby_b7• 12 years ago

It's not the role of every single worker to deal with how the customer interfaces with the product.

It is, if you work at a company that values your input. (As Google does). The point is not that everybody gives input all the time - the point is that if something goes wrong that affects subgroup ${X}, there's a member from that subgroup who can speak out and provide feedback.

That doesn't work if you're in a company that believes in centralized control and top-down management. Google is not that company :)

And yes, if you disagree with that approach because you want top-down, you do believe there's a certain group that's better suited to make all decisions - they're the managers.

dragonwriter10• 12 years ago

It's not the role of every single worker to deal with how the customer interfaces with the product.

Whether that's true or not really depends on the organizational structure and management philosophy of the company. From everything I've read, role differentiation of the specific type that would make that true is less true, at least within the broad umbrella of "technical staff", is not particularly prominent at Google.

fiatmoney• 12 years ago

"Diversity in points of view" is not an unalloyed good. There are significant coordination costs associated with it.

It is also not something you get when you attempt to recruit people from the same sources and socio-cultural milieus with the same acceptance criteria, but of different genders and ethnicities. Hiring an ethnically diverse range of, eg, MIT/CMU/Stanford graduates does not engender diverse viewpoints.

"If you want the best people working at your company, you should want a group with similar demographics as the customer population". Huh. So, if most of my sales of akvavit are to expat Finns, I should certainly not hire a German to do my security audits. And if most of my sales of peat-optimized spades are to the Irish market, I should certainly not contract out the manufacturing to the great industrial base of Shenzhen. This seems rather insensible and possibly bigoted to me.

rcthompson3• 12 years ago

Hiring an ethnically diverse range of, eg, MIT/CMU/Stanford graduates does not engender diverse viewpoints.

I don't agree with that statement. At the very least, everyone acknowledges that women and men in the same environment have vastly different viewpoints from each other. (Source: Approx. 50% of all jokes, also science) I think that ethnic diversity will also result in more diverse viewpoints, even when passed through "purifying filters" such as elite college acceptance standards.

psaintla• 12 years ago

That reminds me of this cartoon regarding the supreme court http://sedulia.blogs.com/.a/6a00d8341c82d353ef015390fee6ce97...

throwaway54984• 12 years ago

If diversity matters so much and it should reflect the customer population, then perhaps Google (or any other company for that matter) should hire less smart or even dumb people. After all 47.5% of the population has an IQ between 70 and 100.

notduncansmith2• 12 years ago

As early product testers, absolutely. It's one thing to put yourself "in the user's shoes" as far as unfamiliarity with a product, it's another entirely to pretend to have 30-50 fewer IQ points. This could produce some valuable insights :)

QuantumChaos• 12 years ago

Remember how Google+ had significant uptake in the rich white tech dude demographic? Not a coincidence.

Other people have already said it, but what about Facebook or Twitter?

If you want the best people working at your company, you should want a group with similar demographics as the customer population, and if you disagree with that, you either believe there is something inherent about certain groups that makes them better or worse at these jobs, which is plainly bigoted, or you believe that there are external social biases which cause the discrepancies.

That is a false dichotomy. If diversity is in itself good, then that implies that there are significant differences between ethnicities [1]. And in that case, it is certainly possible that different ethnicity might be better or worse at particular tasks, in this case coding. And claiming that the view that such differences is inherent, is bigoted, is just name-calling.

[1] Feel free to substitute ethnicity with X, where X satisfies "diversity means having people of different X".

paulnechifor• 12 years ago

Diversity [...] is good for public relations.

That's pretty much the only reason tech companies are interested in diversity.

unclesaamm• 12 years ago

What a douchey thing to say. There's more to it than that, c.f. every other comment in this thread.

Dewie2• 12 years ago

First I though that people should give X more of a chance in hiring, because they shouldn't assume anything about X's background just because they are X.

Now, at the same time, people say that we should hire X because they have a different background. That sounds like a fun backroom conversation in cases where the diversity-part doesn't work out - "We hired that black guy because we wanted more diversity on the team. It turns out, though, that he has a very, um, non-black background, by which I mean that he isn't really like a stereotypical black person at all. In fact, he grew up mostly with group Y, which we already have a majority of, anyway. So I had to let him go and find some other black people, in the name of diversity."

kaitai2• 12 years ago

Don't worry so much: your black guy (or woman) can never escape his (her) fate in America! I don't think you have to worry about the being pulled over while driving, followed by shopping, and arrested when trying to get into one's own house stopping soon.

gaius• 12 years ago

Remember how Google+ had significant uptake in the rich white tech dude demographic?

Nope. It didn't have significant uptake with ANY demographic.

Dwolb3• 12 years ago

The reason it's important to ask 'why does diversity matter' has to do with overall program metrics. If you don't know why you're doing something, you can't state where you are going, you can't plan how to get there and you can't tell when you've reached the destination. It's a matter of accountability and making sure we're doing things the right way.

tragic• 12 years ago

If you want the best people working at your company, you should want a group with similar demographics as the customer population, and if you disagree with that, you either believe there is something inherent about certain groups that makes them better or worse at these jobs, which is plainly bigoted, or you believe that there are external social biases which cause the discrepancies.

From the point of view of a business, it is by no means clear to me that having a diverse workforce, at least along the traditional lines of demarcation - even assuming that this leads to a 'diversity of viewpoints' - makes the business more successful.

Hollywood, for example, spends the big money on films targeted at the notional 15-30 year old male, and medium budgets on patronising 'chick flicks' for women. It turns a very nice profit doing so, and has done for a long old time. A fortiori triple-A games, most of which I find frankly disturbing nowadays in their contempt for their audience.

Before the 1970s-80s, when equal ops and stuff really became a thing at all, I didn't notice anyone failing to make boatloads of money either, despite reproducing the much stronger racist/sexist biases of society at that time.

Until somebody shows me evidence that increasing diversity on staff and at senior levels/C-level has a causative relationship with increased profits, I conclude that capitalist enterprises are an ineffective vehicle for this sort of social change, and that people would be better served forming political parties, standing in elections, protesting, doing political stunts, strikes, whatever tickles your political fancy, than grumbling about what percentage of whom Google should have managed to hire thus far. It wasn't diversity on the board of Ma Bell that got rid of Jim Crow.

kaitai2• 12 years ago

While I agree with your last paragraph, there have been a number of studies on diversity on corporate boards, for instance:

http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/organization/is_there_a_pay... http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~dobbin/cv/workingpapers/Board_Di...

That's a start. Seems like evidence is mixed, of course, with some part of the evidence "against" diversity confounded by people's unconscious -isms.

It's really terrible, these -isms: I start to worry when a woman is named CEO of a major US company because it seems like they only allow a woman in if the company's doing poorly. And it seems that's borne out by some evidence: http://hbr.org/2011/01/how-women-end-up-on-the-glass-cliff/a... Frustrating.

curun1r• 12 years ago

If you want diverse points of view, race is only one dimension of what you're looking for and using it as the sole measure of diversity isn't really that productive. For instance, I have coworkers that were born in Ukraine, France and Germany who are all lumped into the Caucasian group with me that offer perspectives much more different from mine than my African-American and Asian-American coworkers. My belief is that Country/Region of origin plays a much larger role in your point of view than skin color. This is particularly true when you get to technical skills since different countries educate children in different ways. I have one coworker who attended University in Dubai who's an excellent engineer, but has an approach that's very different from mine.

Also, Asian is way too corse a classification, especially for our industry. It should, at a minimum, be broken down into Middle-Eastern, those from the Indian subcontinent and East Asian. These numbers would be a lot more interesting if they subdivided Asian and then subdivided each category into US and non-US. Knowing what percent of Google's workforce is Caucasian-American rather than simply Caucasian would provide a lot more insight into Google's diversity.

EGreg3• 12 years ago

"But we’re the first to admit that Google is miles from where we want to be"

Who is "we"? And why do they want to be somewhere else?

dragonwriter10• 12 years ago

Who is "we"?

Google.

And why do they want to be somewhere else?

Among other reasons, because Google is employee-constrained (they have plenty of money and plenty of things they'd like to do, but have trouble hiring enough workers that meet their qualification standards to be able to effectively apply the money they have to the opportunities they would like to pursue), and the lack of the diversity in their workforce, mirroring the lack of diversity in their qualified candidate pool -- given the absence of evidence that there are inherent reasons for that lack of diversity -- indicates that improving social barriers that constrain their qualified candidate pool is likely to be an effective way of making more of the people who are innately capable of being Googlers actually able to become qualified to be Googlers, allowing Google to hire more qualified people, allowing Google to more effectively pursue the wide range of opportunities they would like to pursue.

incision• 12 years ago

It appears the prior story on this topic got blasted off the front page [1] for whatever reason. Here's what I had to say over there [2].

1: http://hnrankings.info/7813310/

2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7813811

chris_mahan• 12 years ago

True diversity is diversity of thought.

talles• 12 years ago

What a lovely attitude by Google to open up and show those statistics.

It's especially praiseworthy due the fact it's not a case of "look how 'diverse' we are" but more of a "let's openly discuss these numbers".

droopyEyelids• 12 years ago

I'm always confused by the vagueness of these diversity PR efforts.

When you consciously want to improve something, you set goals for yourself, and then figure out ways to meet those goals. Then people can hold you accountable.

Google doesn't seem to have done any of that. They made a start in choosing what they're going to measure, but I don't understand it. For example, I don't think "Black" is an ethnicity. The differences between a black South African and someone from Egypt is huge, let alone a third generation American.

Also, I notice Google didn't include anything about gender in their diversity graphs, and I think everyone believes gender and sexual orientation contribute a valuable difference in perspective. I'm curious as to why they chose to exclude gay, transgendered, straight, and everyone in between and outside those labels from this push.

And then, even if they define all the categories of diversity they want, how the hell do they determine what their targets are for all the different demographics?

xienze6• 12 years ago

"We need more diversity" is code for "we need fewer white men", but I think you already knew that. Everyone does, that's why it doesn't have to be stated.

doodyhead• 12 years ago

Although it's fairly straightforward to distinguish between gender and sexual orientation, I disagree with these traditional US categories of ethnicity.

Take a 'White' person, for instance: is a White American the same as a White Englishman, or a White Australian? What about a White Frenchman? These are all classified as 'White' but could potentially be vastly different in terms of diversity.

The same argument could be made with the other ethnicities. The 'Asian' category -- are they Chinese, Japanese, Filipino..? Or an American Asian immigrant -- Chinese-American, etc.

If you're aiming for diversity that's representative of your customer base, then surely your measure of ethnicity has to be more granular.

vajorie• 12 years ago

Yes, race and ethnicity are socially constructed and are fluid.

No, however much you try to whitewash it, 70-30-3-4-5 is as shitty as it gets outside of legalized segregation.

xienze6• 12 years ago

Whites are 78% of the US population, so being 70% of Google's population is a pretty fair representation. Asians are over-represented though. What exactly do you think is "fair"? I'm guessing having fewer than 50% whites at Google.

omonra5• 12 years ago

What do you think the 99th percentile of SAT scores look like race-wise?

Before decrying lack of diversity in field X, demonstrate presence of one in the pool of qualified candidates.

vacri• 12 years ago

Your numbers add up to 112%. I'm also a little concerned that you can't think of something shittier than 61% white when it comes to diversity.

nl9• 12 years ago

Are these diversity numbers for the US or for Google as a whole?

If they are world-wide, I find it quite interesting how closely the location of the Google offices where software development occurs[1] matches the ethnicity numbers.

Notably, there is only one development office in Latin America (and none in Spain/Portugal), and the only development office in the Middle East or Africa is Tel Aviv (not clear what ethnicity the workers there would class themselves as).

I'm not aware of any world-class Computer Science programs in Africa. There are some decent ones in South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya, but increasing the number would be a problem worth tackling.

[1] https://www.google.com.au/about/careers/teams/engineering/sw...

cbhl2• 12 years ago

Race is US, Gender is Worldwide.

nl9• 12 years ago

Interesting.. my point is pretty valid then.

waveman23• 12 years ago

In a number of countries you are not allowed to ask someone's race, let alone record it on your computers.

In the USA it is compulsory so you can provide these stats and protect yourself against lawsuits.

seanmcdirmid2• 12 years ago

You are aware that every country has "race" distinctions, even if they aren't the same as the US. E.g. in Tel Aviv, it would be interesting to know how many Palestinians are employed, or in Latin America, how many Africans and natives, in China, how many Tibetans and Uighurs?

Upstream is important, but we should still make an effort.

nl9• 12 years ago

It's possible Google has this data internally but haven't released it externally yet. They don't do any breakdown by location.

And yes: I agree that change takes both upstream push and downstream pull.

ars• 12 years ago

E.g. in Tel Aviv, it would be interesting to know how many Palestinians are employed

Why would there be Palestinians in Tel Aviv? That's like asking how many Canadians are in Tuscon. Unless they are citizens or residents they couldn't work there anyway.

Maybe you meant to say how many Muslims? Or how many Arabs? That at least makes sense.

But in any case, the actual "race" distinction in Israel is Ashkenazim vs Sefardim.

icebraining2• 12 years ago

Just a nitpick, but Spain/Portugal don't fit together - the Portuguese are not Hispanic. My ancestors from my father's side fought the ones from my mother's to prevent it :)

nl9• 12 years ago

Sorry - I was conflating Hispanic & Latino, which of course is inaccurate.

Google's only development office in South or Central America is in Brazil (who presumably don't self classify as Hispanic either?)

bothuman• 12 years ago

If Google achieves a 51% Female 49% Male ratio, is this good? Supporters of forced diversity are implying it is, but why?

If there is something gained by having gender X, then you are saying that genders are not equal. If there is no difference, then why are we doing this? Why are we basing employment on gender anyway?

I'd like to see stats regarding people looking for work who are successful and those that are not. If a woman wants to stay at home, can we not accept her choice? If a man wants to stay at home while the woman is breadwinner, is this not okay too?

groby_b7• 12 years ago

Please do show me these strawmen supporters of forced diversity.

then you are saying that genders are not equal No, you're saying that their life experience is not equal. There's no inequality in terms of ability, but in terms of what you know.
I'd like to see stats regarding people looking for work who are successful

Closest proxy I can find is a study of success rate for MBAs by gender.[1] No surprise whatsoever, women experience lower salaries and career satisfaction. Also, women have less upward mobility into management positions.

If a woman wants to stay at home, can we not accept her choice? The issue is not wanting to stay at home.
If a man wants to stay at home while the woman is breadwinner, is this not okay too?

Of course it is. To make that possible, we need to close the salary gap and address glass ceiling issues.

http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/29182...

asdfologist• 12 years ago

I'd be really curious to see the gender/ethnic breakdown of just the Google software engineers. As it stands it's hard to make a meaningful comparison between Google and the overall US population of CS majors.

kirkbackus2• 12 years ago

They don't have the software engineers specifically, but they have the breakdown of the "Tech" people http://www.google.com/diversity/at-google.html#tab=tech

jpatokal2• 12 years ago

The "Tech" stats at the PBS article are just that:

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/google-discloses-workfor...

fionatg• 12 years ago

Exactly, it feels like they are artificially boosting the figures here because when people look at Google stats they think tech anyway. The Tech only figures are much more male-skewed.

ChuckMcM• 12 years ago

When I worked there I thought they did a reasonably good job on gender, religion, and sexual orientation but there were not enough older engineers there. I wonder what the actual numbers are for that.

purringmeow2• 12 years ago

Burnout maybe? How long is the average work week?

jpatokal2• 12 years ago

This is a near-dupe of the discussion of this PBS article, which has more data, including the tech vs non-tech breakdown:

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/google-discloses-workfor...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7813310

monkmartinez• 12 years ago

Hispanics mentioned 4 times in this thread as of 10:23pm MST. Asian's mentioned 18 times...

Everyone talks Black (27 mentions) and White (82 mentions).... meanwhile Hispanic and Asian ethic groups race higher and higher in total number. [1] In raw numbers, Hispanics are growing far faster than any ethnic group in the US. Companies in this game for the long haul had better recognize that Hispanics will be the dominant ethnic group in relatively short order.[2]

But who are the Hispanics? Better figure it out. It matters now and will increasingly matter much more going forward.

[1] https://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/population... [2]http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/fast-growth-latino-...

Matt_Cutts• 12 years ago

I found data (from 2012) for some other companies: http://money.cnn.com/interactive/technology/tech-diversity-d...

nl9• 12 years ago

The low proportion of Asian sales workers at Cisco is interesting.

a-t-shirt• 12 years ago

And here's an interesting demographics map of the Bay Area from 2010: http://minus.com/i/bgqCzuSwvcAi1

I wonder the extent to which Googlers' lives at work are affected by Google's new-found focus on diversity.

When a company's culture shifts, so will its output. It's inevitable.

bowlofpetunias• 12 years ago

Ah, the US, where blatantly racist categorization of humans is used to prove your not racist.

Seriously, how many other countries divide people in "black" and "white"? Or is it even legal to do so?

jqm• 12 years ago

Not to mention it makes less and less sense everyday. Look at how many multi-racial people there are. Well, almost everybody really if you think about it.

buyx2• 12 years ago

As a person who comes from a place where there has always been an unhealthy obsession with demographic classification (South Africa), I'm curious about the "Asian" classification, which seems even more worthless than the average racial classification. Does it encompass both South Asians and Chinese? Do they have a common "Asian experience" in the US? Does the average person whose ancestors came from Tehran have much in common with someone from Beijing?

dmm• 12 years ago

I think I get what you're saying. The continent of Africa contains more human (genetic) diversity than the rest of the world combined, yet almost everyone from it would be classified as "Black".

buyx2• 12 years ago

The continent of Africa contains more human (genetic) diversity than the rest of the world combined, yet almost everyone from it would be classified as "Black".

Interesting that you should bring that up: in South Africa under Apartheid, the racial classification of "Black" (previously called "Bantu" and "Native") was a person of "pure" African descent.

In post apartheid South Africa, for the purposes of redress [^] "black" means Indian, Coloured (mixed race) and black Africans. Of course, it was found that disproportionately Coloureds and (especially) Indians were being appointed (they were better educated and more affluent), so there seems to be a renewed emphasis on black Africanness... our Indian finance minister was just replaced by a black African, which was viewed as some kind of milestone - incidentally Julius Malema brought this up a few years ago, but it was quickly sent down the memory hole.

There has been, in recent times the emergence of racial bomb-throwers who claim that whites cannot be "African".

In any case, my point is that even the term "black" is not as clear-cut as we would assume.

[^] I actually do support affirmative action in South Africa as a corrective measure. The potential for abuse does exist, in the future - currently whites, despite a huge amount of whining are not particularly disadvantaged. Sadly there isn't a sunset clause, although the constitution limits reverse discrimination to reversing the effects of past discrmination, a sunset clause of, say 2035, after which all racial discrimination would be banned, would have been better, in my opinion.

guyzero• 12 years ago

Yes, it's not very useful. But there it is. It's no worse than "Hispanic" which isn't really a race, culture or single national origin.

orbifold2• 12 years ago

I really don't get why gender or ethnicity should play any role at all. Especially for jobs based on technical skill it would make a lot of sense to select mainly for ability. It is then very likely that this would have the same skewed distribution of ethnicities that all the 'elite' universities have, despite affirmative action. As a white priviledged male, I feel sort of disheartened reading that all things being equal, officially I won't be hired, unofficially of course often it is the other way around. There are plenty of countries that are much less diverse than the US and still have highly successful companies, so apart from good PR I fail to see why 'working on diversity' does have any meaningful impact.

Tyrannosaurs2• 12 years ago

From a company perspective the reason is you may well be missing out on great talent and the great teams that research shows come with greater diversity.

I don't necessarily agree with affirmative action, but if you believe that many of the factors which contribute towards easily measured ability (attending a good school, work experience) may be skewed, then you presumably also accept that there is untapped potential out there - people with the ability to be as great but who have been in some way - fairly or otherwise - disadvantaged.

In IT in particular, where everything changes rapidly, you want to be hiring for potential as much as skill the candidate has today.

I don't think it's about picking someone because they're part of a minority, it's about thinking about how you look for and judge candidates to take into account that potential which so far hasn't been tapped.

orbifold2• 12 years ago

I agree that there is a lot of potential lost due to unequal opportunities (for example children with poor parents, versus children with rich parents) and peer pressure / gender stereotypes. I've studied physics and the 5% of female students consistently were well above average for example, which suggests that only a portion of the extremely talented females even considered studying physics.

I am not sure if an individual company can really do anything about the factors contributing to those inequal oportunities. I feel for many skills they come to late, the education system is really the place that should work to reduce the amount of wasted potential.

marincounty• 12 years ago

Google needs to hire a few older people who know about the Mcarthy Era, and how Nazis used personal information against family members? And yes, Duckduckgo is getting better each month. My love affair with Google is long over. She taped everything I said, and will not stop stalking me.

merrua• 12 years ago

It's tiring always being first, always being different, always being the one who has to adapt, denying important parts of yourself just to get the chance to do your job. It’s like being a stranger in a strange land, where you speak the language but nobody learns yours. That's why even women who do well in development end up leaving mid-career. http://www.fastcolabs.com/3008216/tracking/minding-gap-how-y... [You could swamp out woman with any other minority group and it would still be true. Its much harder to stick with something when the river flow is actively against you.]

ap22213• 12 years ago

It's nice for Google to publish this, but their commentary is misleading.

From 2000 to 2009, 10% (48,897 / 471,318) of Computer Science undergraduate degrees were awarded to Blacks, according to NSF ([1][2]).

[1] http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind12/c2/c2s2.htm [2]: http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind12/append/c2/at02-19.xls

darkhorn• 12 years ago

I think that the author doesn't know the difference between race and ethnicity.

julesbond007• 12 years ago

I wonder how many of those minorities are working the low ends at Google...the details of course didn't say. Also, they stopped short of saying it's the perception and blame the facts on 'statistics'. I'm sure they have no problems hiring cooks, janitors, etc who are minorities.

Getting to work on diversity at Google

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